Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Ashkenazim are defining themselves as non-white

Has Sigal Samuel of the Forward had a Eureka moment? As a 'Mizrahi ' Jew she has always defined herself as non-white, in opposition to Ashkenazi 'whites'. Under pressure from Donald Trump and his 'white supremacist' supporters, Ashkenazi Jews are being pushed into joining her in that space, she claims. But well before Donald Trump Jews in Europe were being rejected as 'oily Levantines' who should go back to Palestine*. Or are these ethnic categories, borne of an obsession with identity politics, simply absurd?

Sigal Samuel: non-white

“I have lived for 26 years under the illusion that I am
unconditionally white…. Recently I have started looking at my face and
going, ‘Oh man, do I look too Jewish?’” Sydney Brownstone, the reporter
who voiced this question
in a recent Blabbermouth podcast, is not alone in wondering this. Many
Ashkenazi Jews who have always assumed that they’re white are noticing
that they’re not white enough for Donald Trump’s white supremacists.
Suddenly, they’re asking themselves: Wait, how white am I, exactly?

To tackle this question, try a little visualization. Picture all
American Jews arranged along a spectrum. On one end are the Ashkenazi
Jews who identify as white and get coded as white by society. On the
other end are the Jews of color who can never pass as white: black Jews,
Chinese Jews and others who get read as non-white on the street. In the
middle of the spectrum are Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, who sometimes
pass as white and sometimes don’t.

As a Mizrahi Jew — my ancestors come from India,
Iraq and Morocco — I inhabit that ambiguous middle space. For a long
time, it’s been a lonely place to be, since Ashkenazi is Judaism’s
default setting in America. It’s also been massively confusing, since I
often reap the privileges of being white-passing, even as I get selected
for “random additional screenings” by the TSA or for “Where are you
really from?” queries from strangers on the street.

But here’s how I think about what’s happening now: Ashkenazi Jews are
increasingly getting pushed into the middle space with me. The
ascendant discourse of white supremacy, which posits that Jews are not
“pure” whites, has thrust them into this space — a space where the lines
of your identity are perpetually blurry, where a sense of racial
belonging constantly eludes you, and where the category of whiteness is
always already in crisis, because your inability to situate yourself
cleanly inside it (or cleanly outside it) shows how logically incoherent
the category must be.

This is one of those questions that can be answered by "It's relative" as well as by other answers. The ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds did not see themselves as Black. They clearly distinguished themselves from African Blacks, then called Aethiopians in Greek and Kushim in Hebrew, etc. To be sure, a dynasty from Kush [northern Sudan of today] conquered Egypt and it appears that the Queen of Sheba came from this dynasty, Sheba being the former name of Meroe on Nile in today's Sudan [also called Nubia in Roman times]. These Black people were called as-Sudan in Arabic, which simply means black and referred to all of Black Africa, just as Kush and Aethiopia also referred to all of Black Africa. The country name of Sudan is then the Arabic word for Blacks. Thus, the Arabs distinguished themselves from Blacks.

The notion of non-white did not exist then under any name, as far as I know. However, many of the Mediterranean peoples such as Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians/Lebanese, Italians and Spaniards came to the USA in the last few hundred years. Many of these people, were olive-skinned or swarthy or sallow-skinned (olivastro in Italian), the terms often used in the past. Their rights and social status in America was higher than that of Blacks or mixed race people in general. They were typically treated as whites, although there were those who looked at them cross-eyed and suspected them of being not quite white. Indeed, around 1900, when the US congress was passing laws against East Asians, like Chinese and Japanese, Syrian/Lebanese Americans went to court to get themselves officially and legally identified as "white," whatever their exact skin tone may have been according to a photometer. These Syrian/Lebanese won their case and were thus declared white. Therefore, they were legally exempt from the laws against Asians, although Syria and Lebanon are in Asia.

When I lived in the USA, I recall that sometimes I was seen or referred to and/or Jews and Italians generally were referred to as being not quite white. Moreover, in some places in America there were very rich people who considered themselves racially superior to Jews, not to mention Blacks, and enforced racial covenants on housing sales in certain rich suburbs, like Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Otherwise "free-thinkers" have trouble with their thoughts when they feel identified as white. http://washingtonjewishweek.com/33648/you-should-know-leanne-gale/ feels strongly that,it's "unconscionable for the Jewish community to abnegate our responsibility for trying to dismantle the system of racism and white supremacy because we may disagree with black lives matter organizers around some things on Israel/Palestine."

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)